A Complete Picture
Annie Leibovitz Is Ready for An Intimate View of Her Life

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 19, 2006

NEW YORK

Annie Leibovitz is sitting in her Greenwich Village studio, watching her life flash before her eyes.

Fifteen years of it, to be precise, the part she's collected in her new book, "A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005," whose 472 pages her visitor is flipping through now. It's a startling compilation, including as it does both previously unseen images of her family and her companion, Susan Sontag -- who died in December 2004, just weeks before Leibovitz's father -- and the trademark portraits that shout out to celebrity worshipers from the pages of Vanity Fair.

Different planets? Not to the photographer. Her book title says "life," not "lives." Yet the private and the public work -- and the way Leibovitz talks about them -- can feel shockingly at odds.

Take this close-up of a rippling, naked torso: It's Sylvester Stallone's. "I like him better without his head," she says, explaining the simple Hollywood concept behind the 1993 shot. "He was selling his body."

Now take the nude on white sheets, pillow partially covering her chest, which was shot the following year. This is Sontag, who'd had a radical mastectomy during her first bout with cancer. "I think she felt like she wasn't beautiful -- and I thought she was beautiful," Leibovitz says.

She calls the photograph "one way to show my love."

Flip, flip, flip. More pages turn.

Here's an extended family cavorting at the beach; an intimate moment in a Venetian hotel; a pregnant actress, naked save for the humongous jewels with which she has chosen to ornament her hand and ear. Here are birth and death, artifice and performance, love and loss -- everyday human drama juxtaposed with the theatrical excess that celebrity culture demands.

Leibovitz doesn't much like the term "celebrity," at least when applied to her day job. She calls herself a portrait photographer, which at least sounds dignified, and talks about the blend of "assignment work" and "personal work" that makes up the new book. Both elements were needed, she says, because "I don't think they were strong enough without the other."

Still, there's no doubt which genre she thinks is the most important right now.

As she told the overflow crowd crammed into Northwest Washington's Politics and Prose bookstore on Monday, putting the book together helped her grieve. She choked up momentarily as she read the last line from her introduction:

"It's the closest thing to who I am that I've ever done."

'We Are So Complicated'

Who she is this day, on the surface at least, is a nearly 6-foot-tall, 57-year-old whirlwind wearing jeans, hiking boots and a black V-neck top over a green tee. She carries herself with the confidence of a strong woman used to lugging heavy camera equipment through five-star hotels.

She's a bit less confident with words, at least those intended for publication, though part of that may be that she's worn out from being asked to emote on cue. "I'm learning not to say everything," she says.

A minute later, she tells a story about how Sontag -- a renowned essayist and novelist who was nothing if not ferociously verbal -- once gave her brief delusions of writerly grandeur.

It seems that Leibovitz's iconic photograph of a naked John Lennon curled in the fetal position beside Yoko Ono had been removed, at the last minute, from a Los Angeles show. Sontag wrote a paragraph on censorship that Leibovitz released as a statement. The Los Angeles Times then asked the photographer for an op-ed.

"I thought about it for a minute and I said, 'Yeah!' " recalls Leibovitz, laughing. Fortunately, she came to her senses in time.

She was an Air Force brat, repeatedly changing home towns until the family settled in Silver Spring for her high school years. At the San Francisco Art Institute, in the late '60s, she began studying photography. A boyfriend told her she should go work for Rolling Stone.

The rest is magazine history: Leibovitz starred at RS until 1983, when she moved on to help revive Vanity Fair.

An interviewer for a German magazine once suggested that a Leibovitz portrait captures "the essence of a person." Bull, the photographer countered. "We are so complicated -- we have so many sides, but that's the fun of it: 'Which side shall we deal with today?' "

On the evidence of her connection with the famously intellectual Sontag, she's a good deal more complicated herself than a stereotype like "imagemaker to the rich and fabulous" might suggest.

The two women met in the late 1980s, when Leibovitz did some publicity shots for one of Sontag's books. They shared a love of travel, both the adventurous and the luxurious kind. "A Photographer's Life" opens with a shot of Sontag at Petra, a stunning ancient site in Jordan. In Venice, a frequent destination, Sontag took the frames of Leibovitz that ended up on the book's cover. And without the writer's energetic activism, the photographer would never have made it to besieged Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1993-94 -- where, telling herself at first that she was qualified only to shoot portraits, she ended up with some striking reportage.

"When I met Susan, how could I not imagine that it was this opportunity for the work," Leibovitz says. Here was the author of "On Photography" telling Leibovitz she was good but could be better. "That was just raising the bar for me."

Their being together wasn't "something that we went around and broadcast." Sontag liked privacy -- toward the end of her life, she tried not to do interviews with anyone she didn't know -- and Leibovitz doesn't volunteer too much emotional detail.

She doesn't have to. The images -- whether of Sontag curled up with work-in-progress on a hotel bed, cradling Leibovitz's newborn child, suffering through chemotherapy or elegantly laid out for burial -- do that work themselves.

So do the family pictures: of Leibovitz's parents dancing with a grandson and renewing their wedding vows, of her peaceful-looking father on the day he died and of her mother lying in bed the morning afterward, a daughter on one side, a granddaughter on the other.

Leibovitz had slept with her that night, not wanting her to be alone. In the morning, according to family custom, the others just crawled in.

'Sarajevo Next to Brad Pitt'

"A Photographer's Life" began with Leibovitz digging through old pictures to put together a little book for Sontag's memorial service. The more she dug, the more images she found that she didn't know she had.

She'd signed a contract with Random House for a collection that was to cover the years from 1990 to 2005. These were the years she'd been with Sontag. She began to think of combining her personal and public work.

The notion wasn't without precedent for her. In the late '90s, Stern magazine had asked her to put together some work for its "Portfolio" series, in which whole issues are devoted to individual photographers.

"I did the edit as if this is the photographer I'd like to be ," she says. "I took the assignment work and the personal work and made it the same size, and I was floored with how it worked: Everything was sort of made democratic."

She points out some of the effects that the project created. For example: "Here was suddenly Sarajevo next to Brad Pitt."

Whoa. What happens when you do that , she is asked?

"Well, what do you think happens," she shoots back.

But that kind of bizarre counterpoint was actually happening in her life. She'd go to Sarajevo, shoot a baby being born, without anesthesia, in the midst of the siege; shoot a bloody smear on the road where a boy had been blown off his bicycle -- and the next thing she knew, "I had to remember which side to shoot Barbra Streisand's face from."

The Stern Portfolio became "the bible for this book." In a barn at her country home in Rhinebeck, N.Y., she created a wall of personal work and another wall of assignment work, ready to be culled and combined.

Then she asked Mark Holborn for help.

Holborn is an editor of visual arts books who'd worked with the likes of painter Lucian Freud and photographer Richard Avedon. On the phone from London, he talks about what he and Leibovitz did over the course of a few days in August 2005.

The scale of the project was thrilling, he says, like doing a big-budget movie when you're used to artsy, low-budget films. "You can build something of far greater complexity. You can have flashbacks. There's room for multilayering to take place."

Beyond that, there was the extraordinary range of Leibovitz's work:

"You've got these raw personal documents from life, then some of the most expensive pictures ever made." You've got a black-and-white world of reportage and a color world "where everyone is performing."

What happens when you edit them into a whole? Holborn explains:

An early decision was to use Leibovitz's evocative landscape photographs -- which she loved, but about which she was insecure -- to introduce, pace and end the book.

After the initial landscapes, "you go straight into your mum and dad on the beach -- as ordinary as you can imagine." Ordinary things then happen, "but the ordinary things are epic: Parents die, babies are born, lovers die."

It could be anyone's story, anybody's family album. Ah, but then you inject "Bush, Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nelson Mandela." Leibovitz's personal narrative, Holborn says, is populated "by people who populate all our lives."

The public/private contrast can be jarring, of course. But even within the public portraits, the sequencing can startle.

Here's Mandela, one of the great men of the 20th century. Turn the page and you get Mick Jagger shirtless on a bed, posing like a pretty girl. "The juxtaposition is shocking," Holborn says.

Other shocks come from the mere passage of time.

Check out Leibovitz's group portrait of the Washington powers that be, as of December 2001. George W. Bush is flanked by Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Andrew Card, George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld.

Everyone looks serious, confident and in charge.

Then there's the bleak, black-and-white shot, dated 2002, that includes the husband-and-wife writing team of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne.

Two years later, Dunne would be gone. A year after that, Didion would publish "The Year of Magical Thinking," a controlled yet emotional meditation on intimacy and death. Around the same time, Leibovitz -- whom Didion says she's known since the photographer was 19 -- would ask her to look at the dummies of "A Photographer's Life."

Leibovitz showed the book to others close to Sontag, too. "I think what I was looking for," she says, was "just whether or not it was okay" to publish something so personal about someone who was gone.

Didion looked, and then said yes, it was.

"A lot of people have expressed to me that they wouldn't have written about John the way I did," Didion says. But she thinks her husband would have given his okay.

And she thinks that Sontag, whom she also knew and loved, would have approved of what Leibovitz has done.

'Like Life Itself'

"I know what that is. That's just cockiness. That's, like, silliness," the photographer is saying.

The page she's looking at shows Leibovitz herself, half-naked, shooting self-portraits in a hotel mirror. She'd always wanted to try one "out of the shower, my hair pulled back," she explains, "but I had a 35-millimeter lens on and I ended up shooting a little more than my head."

Okay. But cockiness is part of what makes her successful, right? She's not afraid to throw herself into any situation?

"I don't know. I come from a big family of boisterous, loud people and used to think if you're loved as a child or something, you feel a little more comfortable."

Flip, flip, flip. There's no time to pause at every photograph and at times they begin to blur. Sometimes the blur is like a Leibovitz home movie, frames zipping by too fast for you to pick out individual sisters and aunts. Sometimes it's a montage of the pop culture dreamscape, a world where we're invited to call everyone -- Bruce, Hillary, Quentin, Vanessa, Nicole, Susan -- by their first names.

The book "was so full of everything," Didion says, recalling her first impressions. "It was like life itself. You don't separate out the performance aspect of life from the private aspect of life; they all come out of you at once."

Yet there are hints that Leibovitz is tiring of the performance part.

Over and over, with slight variations in the wording, she's been telling interviewers: This is the best work I've ever done. It's clear she doesn't mean the nude shots of Demi Moore.

Now, as the pages go on turning, she talks about wanting to do more landscape work, about wishing there were more outlets for photographic reportage. "I'm really astounded at the reaction to the book," she says. "It's such a beautiful thing. I can't publish that work in magazines."

Holborn thinks he understands her dilemma. "When your arena is the cover of Vanity Fair," he says, "you're bound to question whether that's at odds with the possibility of being an artist."

"A Photographer's Life" is replete with portraits of older creative types, many now gone: Richard Avedon, Johnny Cash, Philip Johnson, Sontag. Leibovitz admires those who "continue to evolve as they get older, who are graceful in their aging and incorporate their knowledge."

Art, life, death, survival -- there's much more to talk about here. But the interview's in overtime already. Time to move ahead to the book's concluding images: mostly elegiac landscapes, with one final shot of Sontag, ascending Mount Vesuvius.

But wait. "It's not quite the ending -- there are some more babies coming!" Leibovitz exclaims.

Sure enough, you were going to flip right by those shots of her twin girls being born, to a surrogate mother, in May 2005.

She'd had her first daughter 4 1/2 years earlier. She'd loved and been loved by her own large, loud family.

Now she wanted life, in all its boisterous bigness, to go on.